Pakistan held a repeat election in an upscale area of Karachi that was plagued with allegations of vote-rigging, despite the shooting death of a senior member of former cricket star Imran Khan's party.

As recently as the 1930s, the official view of Britain’s ruling class towards India bordered on fascism. In those last, sepia-tinged days of the Raj, Winston Churchill, who once called Gandhi a “seditious fakir”, said that if the British departed “India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages”.